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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Life
Like
Tended
Fantasies
Spectacular
Fantasy
Would

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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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